Hello WordPress 3.3! The legendary Content Management System (CMS) — or blogging platform for us mortals — has been given a slick update, code-named ‘Sonny’ after the late jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt.

WordPress 3.3 is now available us an automatic update through your WordPress dashboard, or as a separate download from the official WordPress site. WebsiteDefender exhaustively recommends that you keep updated with all the latest versions of your WordPress installation as well as the plugins you use. So, let’s explore what’s new in WordPress 3.3:

Allow current_theme_supports() to be used to check for specific post formats

Improved Menus

Contextual help for Twenty Eleven theme options page

Plugins

Improved Plugin upload and validation

Stop remembering the last viewed plugins screen; always show all plugins when returning to plugins.php

Tools

Add the Tumblr importer to the Importers List

Add wxr_export_skip_postmeta filter for skipping postmeta in exports

Users

Removed user option to disable Toolbar (admin-bar in 3.2) in the Dashboard

Settings

Add postname to Settings > Permalinks and remove the help text talking about permalink performance; make the slugs (and /archives/ rewrite base) translatable

Clarify Settings > Privacy

Use title case in Settings > General

Disallow indexing wp-admin and wp-includes in robots.txt

Install Process

Multisite

Allow creating sites with IDN domains

Move network/settings.php POST handling out of network/edit.php

Dissolve wp-admin/network/edit.php

Add ‘Network Enable’ link after installing a theme in the network admin

Use update_blog_details() in wpmu_update_blogs_date()

Change Network Settings to just Settings

Implement bulk update for network/themes.php

Fix inviting existing users to a site with email confirmation

Check for plugin/theme updates every hour when hitting update-core.php, not just themes.php/plugins.php

Update to WordPress 3.3 Today

Apart from some really neat usability enhancements, make sure to update your WordPress installation to ensure your website or blog is no longer vulnerable to any known WordPress security issues. To really ensure that your site and visitors are safe, register to the 14-day Acunetix Trial, and identify any vulnerabilities that might be lurking in your WordPress installation.